Among the distinguishing characteristics of the last 1000 years of West/Europe/Latin Christendom is an almost uninterrupted history of religious (ethno-religious) persecutions. Before the so-called Wars of Religion which divided Europe along largely sectarian Christian (Protestant vs Catholic) lines during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the region, that today stretches from England to Poland, witnessed systematic forms of religious discrimination and recurrent acts of mass violence against two groups in particular: Jews and Muslims. Although its contemporaries, the neighboring monotheistic zones of Orthodox Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantium) and the Islamic world, were not free from religious intolerance and anti-minority oppression, they developed forms of accommodation and coexistence. Departing from a comparative vantage point, the seminar seeks to understand the causes of escalating anti-minority violence in Western Christendom after 1100. Students will consider different conceptual approaches. We will also examine case studies of purging (including mass expulsions, show trials, and pogroms), dispossession (and mass enslavement), and segregation of non-Christians communities, or in other cases, of forcible conversion and mass surveillance.
